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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Their logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...

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there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff

13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?

Not if enough folks think your posting there is a sign you're an ass.

If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.

Those people would have long left X though so I'm not sure why the existing people would think that. If you're talking about external people judging them about posting there, no one thinks that, like the sibling comment mentions. People will just think at worst that they might need the reach of X so they begrudgingly post there.

I have never seen KKK posts on X. Either you're commenting from personal experience, in which case, wow, who were you following, or you're going off reporting which would seem to be a bit skewed.

KKK memorabilia is what was said.

"a bar with KKK memorabilia" is what was said.

It's an analogy. You'll find plenty of neo-Nazis and bigots of all kinds in the replies of any political post, posting away happily to their echo chamber.

Even if it were true, that is not the logic they cite though. They make up a story of the impressions were reduced relative to the platform's old days, not absolute terms; they don't address the cost of tweeting being minimal at all, almost certainly a year of tweeting would be less costly than writing a rant blog post against X. Many brands just autopost everything everywhere for syndication purposes.

So we know why they did it. They wanted to take a stance against X. They just didn't have the balls to say it out loud or the dignity to leave quietly.

Literally nobody that takes this stance around X has or should have political relevancy to begin with though.

X "impressions" are not worth very much

At least half of those are bots.

Sounds like: I wont get out of bed for $100k

Same, but I'll get into bed for half that

Ah I see what you are saying. You are a mattress tester.

>there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff

what tradeoff?

This is what I haven’t seen a single person defending this attempt to answer.

What cost is there to post on X at the same time as the other platforms? Zero. It’s not like they need to moderate forums.

We all know what the people defending this are doing it for and EFF barely plays into it at all. This is Musk Man Bad, nothing more.

X has more active users than it ever has in its history

I had that exact same thought. The argument they presented applies to any walled garden, they gave no reason why X would be the exception.

It's clear this is about politics, and I'm not opposed to that, Elon is not awesome, but trying to justify it otherwise seems kind of shady.

It's pretty damn simple actually. Their target audience by and large doesn't use twitter anymore, either.

They're a global issues advocacy organization. "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right.

Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.

> "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right

Yes. If.

By that logic they should be printing memos and dumping them in the Hudson, in case some of the people swimming there want to read them.

I think you just need to accept that clearly the EFF is not getting engagement on Twitter anymore - either because the academic and professional crowd has largely left for better moderated, more interesting spaces (like I and most of my friends did). Or because they are being downranked by the algorithm.

In either case, they're making this decision based on data that they have, clearly the tiny amount of traffic from Twitter is not worth the effort and reputational harm that comes from staying on the platform.

>By that logic they should be printing memos and dumping them in the Hudson, in case some of the people swimming there want to read them.

And if it costed as much as posting on X, they should.

>In either case, they're making this decision based on data that they have

And people take issue precisely with that not making any sense, which leads people to look at stuff like

>clearly the tiny amount of traffic from Twitter is not worth the effort and reputational harm that comes from staying on the platform.

By which I mean "stuff like that statement". Not that they ACTUALLY face any reputational harm (a ludicrous assertion) but that the politics high above have shifted in such a way that they'd agree with something like that.

This betrays their mission and paints a bad picture of their future, which ironically, does incur in reputational harm.

The current electronic frontier is AI and X is the place where high level AI researchers, developers, influencers and users converse. IDK where else has more of the intellectual discourse on AI. Definitely not the likes of instagram or TikTok. Sure, those platforms are more censored and kid friendly, but I don't think that's really who the EFF should be focusing on as their audience.

This is a great point and it makes we worried that EFF might be pivoting to be less about the technological frontier and more about social issues.

I think you're confusing "where high level AI researchers, developers, influencers and users converse" with "the intellectual discourse on AI".

The valuable discussions aren't the same as the hype machine.

I would say that their targeting has changed, more than the audience itself.

I think they see X now as a branded political vanity project for one guy, much like Truth Social is for Trump. I know a lot of us see it that way.

For what good it does, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook aren't that yet (the Metaverse might have been borderline though, haha)

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